Etymologies

Examples

At first itwasall men, because they'd conceded the wedding-dress trade to the women's shop down the street, but when Carmen was in tenth grade her mother prodded her father into taking over the small store next to theirs.

It is apparent that Virginia already commanded a circle of loving admirers: Bobby Throckmorton, teasing slender Virginia for worrying that she had looked overweight in her blue wedding-dress, sent a present of chocolates to his ‘Dear Fat Girl’ the following month, accompanied, he told her, by ‘love and passion’.

Back in the 1980s when I was in college studying journalism, economics and politics, I really admired the political writing of David Broder -- of course, I also thought Madonna looked drop-dead sexy in that wedding-dress get-up, so what the hell did I know?

In a montage of wedding-dress fittings, she honors “new friends like Vera Wang and Carolina Herrera and Christian Lacroix, Lanvin and Dior,” and so on; what I object to is not the name-dropping—think of it as a chick response to “American Psycho”—but the montage itself, which is shot in lazy veils of schmaltz.

But over the past decade, the company -- one of around 40 small wedding-dress makers in and around this remote hill town -- watched its share of the Italian market drop by 20% as Chinese imports and goods made in other low-cost countries flooded in.